The Short Story in Wales (1937–1949): ‘Though we write in English, we are rooted in Wales’

Abstract

This chapter explores the ways in which Wales magazine (1937-49) sought to cultivate a distinctly Welsh modernist aesthetic, one best embodied in the work of contributors such as Dylan Thomas, Glyn Jones, and Lynette Roberts. Wales published English-language writing despite its sometimes Welsh-nationalist agenda, but it also demonstrates an awareness of and connections with the ‘intra-national’ dimensions of modernism across the United Kingdom. The magazine carried advertisements for Hugh MacDiarmid’s The Voice of Scotland, while also publishing fiction by writers such as Celia Buckmaster and Wyndham Lewis. While this modernist impulse is most obviously evident in the first run of the magazine (1937-40), the chapter argues that the short fiction published in its later incarnation as a cultural miscellany (1943-49) demonstrates continued engagement with both international and ‘intra-national’ modernist paradigms.